Staff Reports
Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard quietly dropped a bombshell on June 12 when her office published declassified material showing that the U.S. government has funded more than 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries, including facilities in Ukraine. This disclosure comes straight from the ODNI itself and is not some armchair conspiracy — it is an official accounting of long-standing investments in foreign labs that taxpayers underwrote for decades. Americans deserve to know what our money paid for and why this was hidden from public view.
The slide deck Gabbard released highlights specific facilities and notes that some U.S.-funded labs handled especially dangerous pathogens and showed biosafety deficiencies — even naming an institute in Kharkiv and referencing organisms like Brucella, anthrax and Ebola in the materials. Those are not hypothetical hazards; the documents identify real vulnerabilities in real places, which should set off alarm bells in any patriotic citizen worried about national security and public health. The intelligence community’s own records make clear that these are not garden-variety academic collaborations but programs with serious biosafety implications.
This release also arrived just days before Gabbard’s exit from ODNI and in the wake of the Trump administration’s executive actions to end federal funding for certain gain-of-function research — a measure taken because Americans rightly feared risky experiments with pathogens. Observers have noted that the timing and the depth of the disclosure raise questions about why previous officials allowed this program to expand in opacity and why so much of the history was shuffled into classified folders. If the paperwork can be produced now, the American people deserve a full accounting of how and why it was concealed.
Gabbard did not mince words: her statement accuses career officials, public-health elites and past national-security teams of lying to the public and hiding these programs. Whether you cheer her politics or not, when a DNI says critical information was withheld, that is a scandal that transcends party lines — it is about competence, transparency, and protecting everyday Americans from needless risk. We must demand answers about who authorized these programs, what oversight existed, and whether any of that work crossed ethical or legal red lines.
Beyond political theater, the practical danger is obvious: some of the labs cited were located in conflict zones and were flagged as vulnerable to attack, seizure or damage — circumstances that could let pathogens escape or fall into hostile hands. The ODNI says it will continue working to identify where the labs are and what pathogens they contain, which is exactly the kind of sober follow-through this revelation demands; those charged with protecting the homeland must get to work immediately. Allowing more secrecy and delay is simply unacceptable while Americans’ safety could be on the line.
For years Washington funneled money through programs like the Cooperative Threat Reduction and other Defense Department initiatives to modernize and secure former Soviet-era research sites — investments that, on paper, were supposed to reduce risk, not amplify it. The record shows substantial Defense Department involvement and long-running funding in places such as Ukraine, which is why people on Main Street have the right to ask whether the systems of oversight failed and whether political convenience trumped commonsense safeguards. Congress must launch rigorous hearings, subpoena the files, and hold accountable anyone who covered up risks to the American people.
This is a moment for patriots and public servants alike to stop the spin and demand transparency. Hardworking Americans don’t care about elites protecting reputations — they care about clean water, safe communities, and a government that is honest about the threats it creates or tolerates. If the White House, career officials, or the medical establishment were complicit in hiding these facts, then the people who betrayed that trust must be exposed and reformed so that our nation and our families are never put at preventable risk again.
